My husband was blind to reality—the raw, unprivileged version of it. How could he understand any differently, though? He’d never been racially profiled and pulled over while driving to the grocery store. People didn’t fearfully skirt around him when crossing paths on the sidewalk. He never suffered discrimination a day in his life over the color of his skin or where he grew up, nor had a minor brush with the law. His father never had the talk with him about how to react to the blatant racism Black kids were constantly exposed to from authority figures, and how to react in such situations, if you wanted to stay alive. My father had the talk with me right before he went off to war, because as a soldier he knew he would be living on borrowed time.

A kid with a tainted past would be doomed if he ever came under the radar. I wasn’t about to put him there. “Better to keep your mouth shut and seem a fool than to open it and remove all doubt,” as Mom would have said.

“Listen, Cody, if I mention Austin’s name to the police, he’ll end up being a suspect, and with his track record, this could ruin his life if they try to pin it on him. Tons of kids’ lives get ruined for wrongful conviction. Look at the Central Park Jogger case and all the kids who lost their freedom for decades over a crime they didn’t commit.” I had made Cody watch the Netflix series When They See Us to show him how corrupt the justice system could be when left unchecked. Hadn’t he been paying attention? I was only getting started as I felt the rage build.

“And just a few years ago a boy named Davontae Sanford was fourteen—a kid!—when he was convicted and spent nine years in jail for a crime that a hitman confessed to shortly after the crime happened! These innocent Black kids were victims of bias, corruption, and incompetence. They were convenient fall guys for a broken justice system. I can’t risk putting Austin through that without talking to him myself first.”

Cody shook his head. His silence was all the disappointment I could handle. He was clueless, but I refused to be. I didn’t have that luxury.

“Do you want to come with me to talk to him or not? I don’t think he has anything to do with Vera going missing, but I’m going there to find out what he knows.”

Now I could read my husband: defeat.

“I’m trusting you big-time with this, Mare. I’m obviously going with you, but if there is anything shady about him, I’m turning him over to the cops to deal with.”